Transcript Woes

Amy Welsh · October 2022

Good morning! I have worked with Blackbaud at my school for a number of years, but this year is my first to be ‘in charge’ of the platform. I unintentionally inherited a transcript headache from my predecessor that I am hoping someone can help with!

Here is the background:
We are a K3-12 school, and we are split into divisions - K3-4, 5-8 Middle School, and 9-12 High School. However, most of our students take Algebra 1 in 8th grade for High School credit. I am running our junior transcripts, and the credit shows up for just a handful of those students on their transcripts. I have searched historical data, and the 10 students for whom their 8th grade credit shows up correctly have seemingly nothing in common - they were all in different sections of the Algebra 1 class, and some were Honors and some not…

588096ab3ab593eaf19f1ed1413785b2-huge-im — Showing correctly

f27076aa0fe239c657e79316b0ce5572-huge-im — Missing 8th grade completely…

Our transcripts are set up so that ‘any year with a course from the Upper School’ is checked, and also under the actual course, ‘print on transcript’ is checked.

Interestingly, when I run them with the ‘Generate Transcripts (old)’, they work correctly.

Again - this is my first year to deal with this side of Blackbaud, and also my first time encountering this problem. If anyone has any advice, I would be so very very grateful!!

P.S. We also see that weird “7th grade” bar - but that is a problem for another day…

Sarah Koziarski · October 2022

@Amy Welsh
@Amy Welsh
The new transcripts are definitely better, at least for our purposes, but they're are also most definitely a huge headache to get right. There are so many options and variables. We ended up eliminating the hassle of trying to figure out how to get credit earned in junior high courses onto the HS transcript by unchecking the option on the junior high classes' course set up so no credit was dealt with by the system across school levels. We enter those grades as a transfer course grade on their HS transcript. In the transcript sample attached, it says “transfer junior high” because it was actually a different school in reality where he earned the credit, but we have ourselves set up as a transfer school so if it was earned in our junior high, it would show on the transcript as Toledo Christian just like the rest of the HS courses.

sample transcript.pdf

Chris Felinski · October 2022

@Amy Welsh
From my perspective, I would also say the new transcripts are definitely better. More features and definitely more intuitive to build out. However, the one thing we lost was the ability to track graduation credits by department. For some reason, the old transcript builder was able to do that; and the new one can only do accumulation of credits by grade level and not department breakdown.

Kari Skolik · October 2022

@Amy Welsh
We have had to work around this as well. For us, the course was originally set up as a middle school class with a high school grade plan and we have to enter it as a transfer grade to get it to show up on the transcript. Even then, we weren't getting it to show unless they had some other high school enrollment for that same year. (for example: if they had a HS advisory or activity group, it would show up, if not, as soon as I went back to that school year and added a HS group, the grade and credit would show up). That's why you are seeing a blank 7th grade bar on your transcript. If you go back to that 7th grade school year for your current junior class (18-19) and go to groups, you can see if they have a high school enrollment group of some kind.

You have to make sure that you are including your MS courses with HS grade plans in your gpa calculations.

Good luck.

Amy Welsh · October 2022

@Kari Skolik

YOU ARE MY HERO!!!!! I went back and added an activity group for the year that my students were in 8th grade and it worked like magic. I'm still on the hunt for the 7th grade group some of my kids were members of that shows the 7th grade banner, but getting 8th grade credit class on the transcript was the priority.

Seriously - I can't thank you enough!!!!!!

Candi Roberts · October 2022

@Amy Welsh Related to that, I would really like to see the option of more than one school level on transcripts. That would help solve the high school credit earned in 8th grade. It would also enable me to provide a 1st-8th transcript for students transferring out.

Elizabeth Perron · October 2022

@Amy Welsh your thank you to these wonderful community members is the real prize!

However just to throw in some fun, everyone who helped on this thread gets 500 profile points.

Thank you for "communitying"!

Elizabeth

Blackbaud Community Team

Scott Chrysler · October 2022

@Amy Welsh - Searching the Ideas bank, I re-found

https://blackbaudk12.ideas.aha.io/ideas/K12OR-I-1949

which is the idea to include multiple school levels on the new transcript builder. It is “Under Consideration.”

I am thrilled this is Under Consideration. As the idea is being evaluated, it is also critical for the engineers to give us the ability to choose what courses appear on which transcripts. For example, when an 8th grader takes Algebra I for graduation credit, the school should be able to select that that course appears on the middle school AND the upper school transcript. As the English 8 course the same student took does not earn graduation credit, we would only want that course to appear on the middle school transcript. This will mean revisiting course set ups, but we feel it is small price to pay for this functionality.

Transcript Woes

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